Category: words

“Written when the future Nobel laureate was in his early 20s, ‘Twixt Cup and Lip was discovered in the University of Virginia archives by The Strand Magazine managing editor Andrew Gulli, who over the past few years has also tracked down long-lost and obscure works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and many others. The play appears in the Strand‘s holiday issue, which went on sale Friday.”

“As a parent I understand that desire to try to keep our offspring in a safe space, but it’s illusory. Life is not safe. The world is full of cruelty, both random and intentional. The world is also full of beauty and I’ve found the trick is to try to concentrate on finding the joy among the rubble, rather than sticking our fingers in our ears, singing lalala and claiming that life is undilutedly sweet.”

“Erotic books on audio started appearing about 15 years ago. Early listeners tended to be men, who had mastered the new technology of downloading, Michele Cobb, the executive director of the Audio Publishers Association, told me in an email. Women joined in later.”

“Ferrante is to women what Judy Blume was to pubescent girls in the 1970s: both a shock and a relief, writing what most don’t even admit to thinking. This is especially true regarding Ferrante’s depiction of motherhood, one filled with frustration, difficult choices, and the constant threat of the loss of identity.”

“The present tense seems natural for capturing ‘the jitter and flux of events, the texture of them and their ungraspable speed,’ [Hilary] Mantel explains. ‘It is humble and realistic – the author is not claiming superior knowledge – she is inside or very close by her character, and sharing their focus, their limited perceptions. It doesn’t suit authors who want to boss the reader around and like being God.'”

Ta-Nehesi Coates, who won for Between the World and Me: “The best part of writing is really to educate yourself. I don’t want to be anybody’s expert. I came in to learn.”

“You have to create the compelling characters and have the beautiful prose and everything, but a science fiction story has to do all that and also build an entire world for you, or come up with some mind-blowing idea on top of all that.”

“The credit-card-size papyrus, which Dr. Smith dates from around A.D. 250 to A.D. 350, contains about six lines of the Gospel of John on one side and an unidentified Christian text on the other. If Dr. Smith’s analysis is correct, it is the only known Greek New Testament papyrus from an unused scroll rather than a codex, the emerging book technology that early Christians, in sharp contrast to their Jewish and pagan contemporaries, preferred for their texts.”

“Heavy bidding for first timers is ratcheting up the size of some advances, agents say, since the competition offers some reassurance that other houses see big potential in a book as well.”

“We are delivering a really robust and proper profit. This will be the best true and underlying performance for this business for seven to eight years. A genuine, little small piece of black at last.”